Re: Is it worth knowing Perl? Real-life examples please

I guess it depends on what you do...

These days, most of my scripting is in python, but back in the day, when I had to do a lot of searches through massive log files and do very quick analyses, perl + File::SortedSeek was hard to beat.

I find python is more readable long-term, but it's VERY hard to beat perl for quick 1-liners (although some of my 1-liners tend to be absurdly long lines...).

[Anonymous Monk]

I am a data manager and database administrator. I was mainly asking with regards to should one invest nowadays in Python since it is on demand? Or become e.g. Perl expert and not care about it too much? It just seems to me that wherever I read, they ask for Python...

[Your Mother]

I’m going to go out on a limb and say: Perl is much better than Python for ad hoc data munging and management and it is the best high level language for terse one-offs written the way *you* think. As far as Big Data® goes, Python has better tools.

If you are an expert in either, the other will be fairly transparent anyway. A Perl expert will have no trouble using Python tools and understanding well written Python code and mostly vice versa. Perl can be harder, sometimes much harder, to follow because it can be written in so many different styles. At our shop we had a Perl hacker who wrote really clean Perl code but in Java idioms and it is truly a pain to follow that kind of over-engineered 15 packages for a single object and its functions kind of logic.

You’re the only one who will really know the answer. Like the others already said, it depends.